Conventional barcodes have enabled items, such as goods for sale or mail within a mail system, to be marked and later identified by suitable reader devices. Further, it is increasingly becoming a more and more established practice to use conventional barcodes to move content from the Internet to mobile devices and vice versa.
Conventionally taking the form of 1D or 2D barcode symbologies, for instance, UPC Symbology (Universal Product Code), Datamatrix Symbology (ISO/IEC16022—International Symbology Specification), QR Codes (JIS X 0510, ISO/IEC 18004:2000, ISO/IEC 18004:2006), or Color Codes, “mobile codes” are printed in newspapers, magazines, on signs, buses, business cards, embedded in content of web pages, displayed on monitors, and on just about any other display that a user might desire. Mobile codes are then “imaged” by a camera-equipped mobile phone. The mobile codes are then used by the camera-equipped mobile phone as a basis for uploading and downloading content and services.
Typically, mobile codes are relatively large in relation to the available screen “real-estate” of the monitors on which they are often displayed. For instance, in a first example of a music store having a monitor that displays a mobile code usable to download a music track, the same display may also show a music video corresponding to the music track. Moreover, it may be that the music store monitor is additionally displaying the name of the song, the artist, and so forth. In this situation, the “real estate” of the display is very limited for displaying conventional mobile codes. Second, conventional mobile codes typically are aesthetically-disruptive and therefore distract from the quality of viewing experience. Even a mobile code having a data size as little as 100 bytes may unacceptably reduce the quality of viewing experience. Third, to further complicate the situation, it is not at all uncommon that a display itself is very small, such as in a second example of a printer-display or a third example of a mobile phone display. Finally, camera-equipped mobile phones tend to have relatively poor resolution and optics; and that alone make it harder for camera-equipped mobile phones to easily identify mobile codes, particularly when an image (of a mobile code) is degraded, for instance, due to environmental conditions such as glare, a shaking hand, obstruction, or other disruption.
It would therefore be beneficial to have a system that enables mobile codes to be read by camera-equipped imaging devices in a manner that is substantially less damaging on the quality of viewing experience.